Hayden Adams on the Success of Crypto Firm Uniswap

Uniswap is a crypto firm that started about five years ago. The company introduced the world to the automated market maker (AMM). The tool works to let people swap currencies on various exchanges and networks without the aid of middlemen.

Uniswap Has Come a Long Way

The company has grown into something nobody was expecting. Uniswap now processes about $1 trillion in blockchain transactions on various networks. In a recent interview, the company’s CEO Hayden Adams talks about the latest Uniswap updates and about all the public comments the company has gotten since opening itself up to critiques.

Uniswap is now in what’s called the V4 phase. In other words, this is “version four.” There have been enough updates to the platform that the version users see now is the fourth major adaptation. Discussing the latest example, Adams said:

Historically, the way that new protocol versions have come out has been almost more like products, in the sense that they’ve been basically announced when they’re almost done, and that was sort of, I think, something that made sense at the time, but with where the Uniswap protocol is today, building in public and inviting the community to build alongside us and contribute to this decentralized protocol is a [good] thing.

One of the big clinchers of the platform is that it now comes with what are called “hooks.” These are tools that expand upon the functionality of staking pools. Discussing their functions, he mentioned:

What you find in the process of building things like Uniswap is that you make a lot of trade-offs. Hooks are essentially ways of customizing and modifying how liquidity pools work within Uniswap. These are done by the people who create pools. Anyone can create a pool and then choose how to customize it. What we wanted to do with hooks is let people basically make these trade-offs themselves and really choose how their pool works.

Adams also talked a bit about the lawsuits the SEC has initiated against Coinbase and Binance. He said:

I don’t really know too much about those lawsuits. Generally, I think that DeFi and decentralized platforms are quite different from centralized ones. There are different properties, and so I don’t have a ton to add. Personally, I do think that over time I always expect to see more decentralized platforms over centralized ones. I think there are fundamental benefits of self-custody, transparency that they can offer, provable solvency, all these things.

It’s All too New

When discussing the potential regulation of his own company, he mentioned:

We have lawyers, and we make sure that everything that we do is legal and all of that. I would say that the way I think about the space, though, is DeFi is a new industry.